The origins of SWOT analysis have been enigmatic, until now. With archival research, interviews with experts and a review of the available literature, this paper reconstructs the original SOFT/SWOT approach, and draws potential implications. During a firm's planning process, all managers are asked to write down 8 to 10 key planning issues faced by their units. Each manager grades, with evidence, these issues as either safeguarding the Satisfactory; opening Opportunities; fixing Faults; or thwarting Threats: hence SOFT (which is later merely relabeled to Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, or SWOT). Subgroups of managers have several dialogues about these issues with the instruction to include the needs and expectations of all the firm's stakeholders. Their developed resolutions or proposals become input for the executive planning committee to articulate corporate purpose(s) and strategies. SWOT's originator, Robert Franklin Stewart, emphasized the crucial role that creativity plays in the planning process. The SOFT/SWOT approach curbs mere top-down strategy making to the benefit of strategy alignment and implementation; Introducing digital means to parts of SWOT's original participative, long-range planning process, as suggested herein, could boost the effectiveness of organizational strategizing, communication and learning. Archival research into the deployment of SOFT/SWOT in practice is needed.
The origins of SWOT Analysis is obfuscated in the literature. This paper fills that void and reconstructs its early development in context. The empirical basis of SWOT started in 1952 within the Lockheed’s Corporate Development Planning Department. One of its thus far unknown pioneers, Robert Franklin Stewart, became the head of the Theory and Practice of Planning group at the Stanford Research Institute in 1962. In 1965, Stewart published the so-called SOFT Approach in a report that was used by many large companies worldwide. In it, he presented a logical set of steps (the so-called chain of reasoning) for corporate aim setting. First, stakeholders’ values are to be collected by staff planners. Then “each manager considers for each of his own activities”… “what must be done to safeguard the satisfactory in present operations;” “open de door to opportunities”; “fix the cause of faults” and ”avert the threats to future operations.” These value judgments are then transferred into senior management’s direction-giving statements of corporate purpose. In 1967, SOFT evolved into: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT Analysis). Stewart’s participatory aim setting ideas have faded from our collective memory as well; they might fit perhaps the ideas propelled by the Opening Strategy movement."
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